Heaven benchmark doesn't make any card hot. Try running a very high-end game. You won't see 66c, especially at those clocks. More like 75c or more.

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All to true, it wasn't until I played metro 2033 and Crysis 2 that I realised that my overclock of 1250mhz was far to much for the summer time ( Card would thermal throttle and I'd get stuttering) so I backed down to 1.100mv and 1150 mhz ( still fast!) and lost 20 degrees enabling me to play without epic stutter

All to true, it wasn't until I played metro 2033 and Crysis 2 that I realised that my overclock of 1250mhz was far to much for the summer time ( Card would thermal throttle and I'd get stuttering) so I backed down to 1.100mv and 1150 mhz ( still fast!) and lost 20 degrees enabling me to play without epic stutter

My 7850 completely outguns my last card*, a hd 6970 that had a pretty high OC

* In direct x 11 games I can get up to a 50% performance increase over the 6970, in other games such as GTA I went from stuttery 25 fps average to a far more tolerable 33 fps average.

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The 6950 shouldn't be that much slower than the 7850. Honestly most reviews I've seen puts them at almost the same amount of performance. The only thing I could imagine would help is if you went from 1gb vram to 2gb.

Well yeah. It is just one 7970 and it's not OC'ed as high as it will go. Honestly I just went for a 100 mhz OC and didn't try to go any higher. Your 6870s are about the same at stock as my 5870s are(the 5870 is between the 6870 and 6950 performance wise), and you have a lot higher OC on your 6870s than I had on my 5870s(1 ghz compared to 875mhz). Also considering your score is only 31 points more than mine, I'd consider that about equal. With the 1ghz OC, I would have thought you would have had a higher score than that compared to my results.

The 6950 shouldn't be that much slower than the 7850. Honestly most reviews I've seen puts them at almost the same amount of performance. The only thing I could imagine would help is if you went from 1gb vram to 2gb.

The most I've been able to squeeze on air with the 6870s was 1030mhz @ 1.3v and at full power I was running at about 75*C at 100% on the GPU fans, for both the TwinFrozr and Reference cooler. The memory doesn't really overclock very well on them unfortunately, but if I ever decided to go with water on them, I'm sure I could squeeze some more out at 1.4v, but honestly, I think I would replace them before that. I only have two 6870s because I wanted to upgrade the video without paying out the nose to do it. I also already had one 6870, so it was a really nice boost for 180 USD (at the time). Since I don't really play any really new games, it's pretty stable for me and I'm generally satisfied. I can't say that the 6800 series has disappointed me. Maybe I'll upgrade when the 8800 series comes out and if I have the money to spare.

The most I've been able to squeeze on air with the 6870s was 1030mhz @ 1.3v and at full power I was running at about 75*C at 100% on the GPU fans, for both the TwinFrozr and Reference cooler. The memory doesn't really overclock very well on them unfortunately, but if I ever decided to go with water on them, I'm sure I could squeeze some more out at 1.4v, but honestly, I think I would replace them before that. I only have two 6870s because I wanted to upgrade the video without paying out the nose to do it. I also already had one 6870, so it was a really nice boost for 180 USD (at the time). Since I don't really play any really new games, it's pretty stable for me and I'm generally satisfied. I can't say that the 6800 series has disappointed me. Maybe I'll upgrade when the 8800 series comes out and if I have the money to spare.

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I had a 6870 as well, they were great cards when they came out, definitely no point going from one to a 6970 like I did my 6870 @1100mhz was not far behind performance wise at all.